


bigger than the sum of two

by twoif



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: But Because No One Has Defined Their Relationships Clearly, Character Has Sex With More Than One Person, F/M, First Time, Fumbling Towards Polyamory If They Can Make It, It Is Not Considered Cheating, M/M, Mediocre Heterosexual Sex, Multi, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 02:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20631704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/twoif
Summary: Riko, Kiyoshi, and Hyuuga in a three-man weave.Not for the first time, she thinks: the quickest path to Hyuuga's heart has always been to rely on him. Teppei had done that when they started the Seirin basketball team, and it had been the most obvious sign she had missed, that Teppei's knife-sharp appeal was in the way he was always saying, with or without words,I need you. He'd been a natural at worming his way into them both. It hadn't been manipulation, or at least not consciously on Teppei's part. But the hypotheticals come quickly and meanly:If only she had been born a boy too, someone who Teppei could have asked,play basketball for me—If only it was in her nature to build a hole into her life that only Hyuuga could fill—If only she had an easy weakness, instead of layers upon layers of demands she's made of her own life to justify asking for more from others—If only she'd beenone of them—





	bigger than the sum of two

**Author's Note:**

> Not compliant with Last Game (Kagami does not go to America) and slight divergence from Replace Plus (re: Kiyoshi).

In the end, Teppei is right, and the Winter Cup rebound is his final play with Seirin. Alex promises him that he'll be back for the next cup, but things drag on like interest on a huge debt: another month for a potential tendon tear, two more for strength training, a can't-miss opportunity to go to a high school training camp. Kagami, who swings by Los Angeles in December en route to seeing his dad for the holidays, is the only one who gets to visit him. He comes back sobered and hesitant, with the news that Teppei had taken Alex up on the offer to stay. She'd pulled some strings for him, Kagami says as all of Seirin's basketball team gapes at him from across a Maji Burger table. "It's some sort of sports medicine thing at UCLA," he says, furrowing his brow, like the words are coming to him in another language, which they probably are.

"Like, for his knee?" Izuki asks, confused.

"No, for him to study," Riko fills in, as she wipes french-fry salt from her fingers.

Riko calls Teppei sometimes, but mostly they write—texts that he responds to 12 hours later, the occasional long email reporting on the status of the new freshmen, Kagami's grades, her new haircut, pictures of Nigou. She assumes, but doesn't know, that Hyuuga does the same. They don't talk about it. Mostly, she and Hyuuga talk about Hyuuga's test scores, which are not good enough to get him into the college he wants. Riko tries for a few unsuccessful weeks to get him to set his sights lower, go somewhere on a sports recommendation, but suspects that part of the problem is that her heart's not in it. His first choice is in Tokyo, close enough to hers, and it'd be nice, she admits to him eventually, to have one of them near, if Teppei is going to be overseas. At least when they're studying, they're together. Eventually Koganei even finds a cram school that Riko will tolerate and Hyuuga can get into.

Without Teppei, the Seirin basketball team still manages to make it out of the interhigh prelims, but loses to Kaijou in the quarterfinals. That's the last official game the third-years play. Led by Kuroko, mostly, they get to the quarterfinals of the Winter Cup too, where they lose to Shuutoku, who eventually beats Rakuzan for the cup. Riko, Hyuuga, and Koganei's cram school has a mock exam during the final game, so they don't see Takao's assist to Midorima that wins Shuutoku the game. When they leave the building, blinking into the late-afternoon sun, it's to texts from Kuroko, who is waiting with Kagami, Aomine, and Kise at a nearby streetball court. Kise has on a dark green wig (a high-quality one, Riko notices with a start) and a pair of glasses and is taping his fingers up when they arrive.

"Kise thought it wasn't fair you missed it, so he wanted to give you a reenactment," Kuroko says drolly.

Next to him, Kagami mutters, "I don't see why _Kise_ gets to be Midorima—"

"You've made maybe _one_ three-pointer in your career _ever_—" Aomine jeers from where he's turning his shirt inside-out to be one of the Rakuzan players.

"Fuck you, _I made one in the last game against you_—!"

"I'm Takao," Kuroko finishes, ignoring them both, and waits patiently for Riko to stop laughing.

Things devolve, as they always do with those four, into a pickup game, with Hyuuga and Koganei making up the numbers for three-on-three. Luck betrays Kagami and Kise, who are put on each other's team instead of Kuroko's, and Kuroko chucks the ball at Aomine's head when he suggests the only fair game would be the five of them against just him. Riko keeps score and coaches both teams over Hyuuga's unhappy yelps of "traitor!"

When Hyuuga puts in a perfect layup for the game, she snaps a picture on her phone and sends it to Teppei. _Missing you_, she writes. Hyuuga is a silhouette in the picture, with his face turned away from the camera, but anyone who knows him well, as she and Teppei do, can tell in an instant: the curve of his spine, his high carriage, the line of his well-defined arms, the sweep of his hair. Teppei, she remembers, had always been good at that, could often pick out Hyuuga from great distances, among swarming crushes of rival teams. _I tower over both of you_, he used to say, leading them both to where Hyuuga was registering Seirin's team or scoping out a locker room. _I get to see that much more_.

The next time any of them see Teppei in person, it's suddenly during the winter of their first year in college. His grandmother just broke her hip, he explains to Riko on the phone, blurry with the ambient noise of an airport behind him. "The surgery went fine and she got her replacement. But it's hard with just the two of them, and she keeps having to go back to the hospital, and if nothing else, I know my way around physical therapy." Even over the phone, she can hear him putting on a shit-eating grin. "For once, my broken knee is a plus rather than a minus."

"How long?" she demands.

"A month, two at the most. I have a cousin in Nagano that's going to move in to take care of them after that. I can hear you worrying, Riko," he teases. "If you care, then you can meet me at the airport and help me carry my bags."

"Shouldn't this be something you ask one of the guys?"

"I don't want it to be a big deal," he says, sighing. "Don't make it a big production, please?"

She plans a welcome back party for him anyway, at Kagami's about a week after his grandmother is discharged. Kuroko hangs up a huge "Welcome Back We Missed You" banner, which Riko can tell that he, in one of his sadistic moods, had made Kagami write, the characters painstakingly copied from example and missing a stroke here or there. Teppei brings souvenirs: American breakfast cereal at Kagami's request, assorted keyrings and powdered sports drinks, a book of puns in English for Izuki. Kagami makes them nabe, which Riko is forbidden from contributing to, and they all toast with sparkling juice afterwards.

Hyuuga is the first to leave, muttering, "I have a paper to finish." His eyes are red, Riko notices, and dry, like the rest of him, which had been abrupt and snappish all through dinner, oddly attached to Izuki, on the other side of the room from Teppei no matter how they arranged themselves in Kagami's barren living room.

Still, Teppei offers to walk back home with him. "We live in opposite directions, you dumbass," Hyuuga can be heard griping from the entranceway as they both put on their shoes, and it's really by accident that Riko catches Kuroko giving Kagami this look, pointed like Hyuuga and Teppei were proof of something Kuroko had been trying to convince Kagami of, and if Kagami would just _pay attention_—but instead Kagami turns to Tsuchida, grabbing at his dirty plates, and misses Kuroko entirely.

Riko has an eye for detail, but the kind of detail that's all tactile: muscles, broken bones, lactic acid build-up, sweat. Many times during the three years she's known him, she's wished for Kuroko's ability to read people, the way he can piece together personality from a few isolated gestures. She wonders, when it's 1AM later that night and Hyuuga has texted her asking if she can sneak out of the house, it's really an emergency, he wouldn't ask if he didn't really need it, and she's shivering in sweatpants and Hyuuga's jacket, if Kuroko had already somehow known, there in Kagami's apartment, that the first words out of Hyuuga's mouth would be, "When you were with Kiyoshi, did he tell you he was into guys?"

She had fallen asleep after coming home from Kagami's, the last one there other than Kuroko, helping them wash dishes and throw away trash. She had been so tired she fell on her bed without washing her face. So maybe she is still asleep and this is a dream: Hyuuga breathing hard in the cold, her face frozen in a smile from shock.

"Into guys?" she parrots, and the line that's always between Hyuuga's eyebrows creases further.

"He did at least with you though, right?" he bites out. He has his arms wrapped around himself, body language closed off, but she can't tell by sight alone if it's just the cold. When she shivers, he steps closer, and she can smell his hair, damp and freshly washed.

"We didn't—" she stammers, and then swallows. "You know, not—" She's not embarrassed, only Hyuuga is so _close_, and it takes her several more slow breaths before she's willing to say, "Not any more than kissing."

The angry noise Hyuuga makes in response is volcanic, like something explosive trapped between his stomach and his nose. Still, he doesn't say anything else, and after a beat, she ventures, "Is that what Teppei said? That we had—?"

"No, it's just—I _assumed_ because when we were—he _acted_ like he had experience_—"_

"He _acted_? With you? Doing what?"

It takes Hyuuga two seconds to go from pale to completely red. He jolts back from Riko, stung, and stomps off, not running, but quick enough so that she misses her chance to grab a hold of his arm. "Hyuuga, wait, don't—" she hisses, but her parents' bedroom faces the street, and her father is a light sleeper. If she raises her voice much louder, there'll be hell to pay for both her and Hyuuga.

When she can no longer see him in his black sweater moving from streetlamp to streetlamp, she goes back inside. Sits on her bed, gently slips off his coat, and just breathes for a while, reconstructing herself. It's three in the morning when she finally texts him, _You'll catch a cold._ He doesn't respond, even though she knows that by now he'll have gotten home as well. She folds up his coat, tucks it into a paper bag, and spends another hour simply staring at Teppei's name in her contacts list. She falls asleep that way, finger on the button, holding her breath.

Riko dated Teppei twice, once when they were first-years and then again, briefly, for less than a month between the Winter Cup and when he left for America. The first time, she'd been the one to confess, and it died out like any other relationship—or at least she thinks so, she's never dated anyone else. He treated her no differently after the breakup, which she had taken as a sign that his feelings had been merely obligation to her own feelings and even to her position on the team, maybe. A twisted way of showing gratitude for her role in giving him the basketball team he wanted.

The second time, it was different. When he hugged her, it felt like he wanted to crush her into him and was holding back. Sometimes she would see an expression on his face that she'd never seen before, shuttered and unschooled, and it thrilled her. Their relationship was a romance she couldn't understand, one from a novel or a shoujo manga, only with her, improbably, in the center. She helped him pack for America, and he introduced her to his grandparents. Not as a girlfriend, she noticed, but with one arm around her waist anyway, holding her close to the solid muscles of his side, radiating warmth.

But even still, they didn't talk about what might come after. He never asked her to wait for him and would let the silence stretch on after a joke, usually made by Izuki, about American girls. Basketball, of course, dominated their conversations, and towards the end he surrounded himself with the other Seirin teammates—recruitment discussions with Koganei and Tsuchida, strategy sessions with Kuroko, strength training with the other freshmen, dispensing old-fashioned and inaccurate study tips to Kagami—like the team was clay hardening and he had one last chance to press in with his fingers.

In the last days before his departure, she'd given in and asked for Hyuuga's help. The three of them would linger after practice together, and Hyuuga would try to set up the conversation and disappear from the room, like Kuroko intercepting on his own teammate to throw a vanishing pass. But that only exacerbated other matters, made Teppei complain that Hyuuga was avoiding him. _I never realized I was this hated_, he'd moan, and it made her worry that she was using both of them to satisfy her own insecurities.

All the Seirin second-years saw Teppei off at the airport. Teppei's grandparents had declined to make the trip, and loaded them with trinkets and food to hand to Teppei in their stead. When it was time for him to board, Teppei hugged Riko tightly, bending down so she could push her nose against his neck. He smelled like oranges, the air outside, and, distantly, rubber and metal and sweat, like a basketball court at the end of a match after all the spectators had left. Pressed into him, she couldn't see Hyuuga, but she could hear him clearing his throat loudly, trying to hide both his crying and his embarrassment over his crying. "Take care of yourselves," Teppei said. Then, mouth pressed against the top of Riko's head, he whispered, "Please, I entrust this to you."

Who, she wonders still, had he been talking to? There are days she thinks he meant to leave her in Hyuuga's care, and days when she thinks he meant he was leaving Hyuuga and the team to her. But mostly she thinks he meant it as a prayer. As if, without him towering over them both, they needed a higher power to watch over them.

Teppei calls her the next day with a lunch invitation. Everything is neutral: his tone, his wording, the choice of a family restaurant not far from her house. He arrives too dressed down for it to be a date, but then again, he'd never been one to dress up. They smile at each other, order coffees and sandwiches, and chat about the party the night before, pleasantries about the team, as Teppei gamely picks at his food and Riko drains her coffee. Yes, Kagami has grown taller, taller than even Teppei now. Yes, Kuroko never changes, but smiles more than Teppei remembered. No, Teppei isn't surprised to learn that Koganei and Mitobe ended up at the same college in Kyoto. Izuki has a girlfriend—Teppei already knows.

Finally, they come to a standstill. Riko taps her nails against the rim of her cup, considering possible next steps. If she waits for him, she'll be waiting forever.

"Hyuuga told me about the two of you," she says. She supposes it's not a lie, and _Hyuuga came to me in a panic and said some very confusing things and I have an educated inference about what happened_ is less dramatic.

There's a beat, and Riko makes a little bet about what he'll say next—_told you what_, or _who_?—which she loses. "What do you think?" he asks, face placid, one eyebrow slightly raised.

What she thinks is neither gracious nor entirely truthful: that until now, she was convinced Hyuuga had been preparing himself to be with her, a year-long process that she supposes has just ground to a screeching halt. He'd tried hard to get into a good university, for her; he'd seen the basketball team through to the end, for her; he'd waited, girlfriend-less, for her; he was waiting, still, for her to tell him yes.

And then, snapping at the heels of that thought, a far more honest one: that she's always expected she would lose Hyuuga to Teppei one day.

But she was Hyuuga's friend first, before she was Seirin's coach or Teppei's girlfriend and ex-girlfriend. So, instead, she looks Teppei square in the face, places the empty coffee cup firmly on the table, like a sword, and says, "Do you know what you're doing?"

A waitress comes by, asks Riko if she wants a refill for her coffee. She doesn't. Her mouth tastes funny and she feels the beginnings of a headache starting to form. She says yes anyway, to give Teppei time to compose his thoughts, time he doesn't need. When she turns back, he is watching her patiently.

"I don't exactly have a plan," he says. "I thought we were just settling unfinished business."

"Feelings aren't just business you can settle, you know. It's not like a match you win and then you just record the score—"

"Riko, I know. Don't worry."

"Well? Is it settled?"

"No." He blinks. He is so steady, not cornered at all, the center under the basket and not the point guard on the outside. Riko presses her lips into a thin line and waits, like she used to do, for the play to emerge. "But that's not what I wanted to talk about," he continues. "I wanted to make sure that you were okay with it."

"Me?" She laughs, surprised. "What does this have to do with me?"

"Aren't the two of you dating now?"

Sighing, Riko tries to push herself away from the table. They're in a booth, so she doesn't get very far, just her back against the seat, rod-straight. In high school, they would sit after practice sometimes, just like this, exchanging half-sentences about the team: if they were developing, how Hyuuga should manage them, which lineup to use against the next rival school. Sitting here across from him, the way he considers her carefully, waiting for her to take up the conversational baton, is achingly familiar. Why did she think they would become different people in his absence? Three years have passed, and they haven't changed the way they see themselves or each other. To Teppei, she and Hyuuga are still two rivers he is wading through; to them, he is still a bridge. 

"Don't be stupid," she says. "If Hyuuga-kun and I were dating, I would have dropped you into Tokyo Bay wrapped around a block of cement the minute I walked into this restaurant." She shows her teeth in a half-grin, an expression he knows she learned off of her father. "And then I would have done the same to him."

"But you don't approve," he counters.

Her mouth goes dry in an instant. The headache that was just starting to form seconds before is in full force now, and for a second it's like her ears are plugged up with cotton and she can't concentrate on anything but the shortest route between her and the exit. 

She takes a deep breath. "My feelings aren't the ones at issue," she says. "Really, it's not any of my business, other than as Hyuuga-kun's friend." Her voice cracks on those words, _Hyuuga-kun's friend_. Embarrassed, she looks up at Teppei's face, wonders if he can tell that she, too, is trading in half-truths. "And as your friend too. You know that."

Teppei drags his fingers through the little pools of condensation his glass of water has left on the table. His doodles haven't changed—little x's and arrows, a circle bisected by a square, like underwater basketball play diagrams. "You know, when I left," he says, "I thought about telling him to take care of you. But you've always been able to take care of yourself, and he's always needed all the help he could get."

"Don't sound so arrogant," she tells him. She smiles at him when she says it, like it's half-teasing instead of her real feelings. "It's not an attractive look on you, Iron Heart."

He smiles back. "It's not arrogance, just a compliment to you. I'd leave myself in your care too, if I could."

They split the bill over Teppei's protests. When they leave the cafe, Teppei stalls, shuffling his large feet, clearing his throat. She's struck by his guilty expression, incongruous on an afternoon where the only thing he's done to wrong her—led her on for a month and then left her high and dry for America—was the only thing they didn't bring up.

"Are you going to Hyuuga-kun's after this?" she asks. Her bus station is in the opposite direction he'd need to go to catch the bus to Hyuuga's.

He hums, low in the back of his throat, a large cat circling and settling down at her feet now that she's figured him out. "Should I?" he asks.

She'd brought Hyuuga's coat, folded in a paper bag, to give her an excuse to see him afterwards, so it's on the tip of her tongue to say, _no, don't go see him, let me see him first, give me this one last chance._ But when she sees Teppei's face, she stops cold. Her mind is coffee-sharp and bitter, running too quickly, taking in Teppei's mouth, curved in a distant cousin of a smile. It was Hyuuga that could do that to him, unman him and make him nervous and indecisive. Through two breakups, she'd never managed that.

"Why not?" she says, managing a smile of her own as she shoves the paper bag at him. "It's been 12 hours since you last saw him. He's probably already forgotten you're back in Japan. You can even use me as an excuse. Tell him I made you bring this back to him."

He smiles, for real now, and bumps her shoulder lightly as they part ways. She watches him as he leaves. The half-turn he does when he crosses the street, his casual wave to her from the opposite end of a crowded crosswalk. Then, his strides lengthening when he no longer needs to keep pace with her, growing and growing until he is a silhouette of a man she doesn't recognize, rushing to meet another stranger.

Hyuuga and Izuki had both been in town for the last graduation match, so when Teppei needles Kuroko into organizing a practice game for him, it's not the first time the first-years have played with Seirin basketball's first OBs. Still, it's the first time they play with Teppei, and as the founder of the team, his myth precedes him, makes him more legendary at Seirin than even the generation of miracles.

Riko watches the match from behind the bench, in a folding chair side by side with the new manager, a second-year girl Riko had painstakingly trained to be her replacement. Much to Riko's embarrassment and fascination, the girl takes careful notes on Riko's offhand remarks—so-and-so should strengthen his ankles, so-and-so had a weak dribble, so-and-so would be better off as a forward. Aida Riko is another minor Seirin legend, she knows—the high-school girl coach that led the team to an unprecedented victory. It's a less obvious fame, but she'll take it.

"I'll never be as knowledgeable as you, Aida-san," the second year says eventually, sighing as she puts down her notebook. "I wish you were still here with the team."

The truth that neither of them say out loud is that Seirin will never be the team it was in its second year, with Teppei and Hyuuga and Kagami and Kuroko. The reasons are beyond their control, caught up in the perpetual motion machine that is luck and fate and the way all victories shake out into defeat, each game just a steady descent from the top. They are still riding out this last year of the generation of miracles, waiting for the sea-change. Soon, without Aomine, Touou too will fade into the background noise Kagami and Kuroko pulled Seirin out of, and Shuutoku along with the other two kings of Tokyo will resume their rightful places. For a second, Riko envies the ordinary existence awaiting all future incarnations of Seirin's basketball team. No need to ruin knees, to run up against the limits of human exhaustion, to defy gravity and physics and their own conceptions of self, just to win one match.

_As if_, she thinks, laughing at herself. If she knew Seirin at all, she knows they'll do it anyway, that any of the first- and second-years she watches now will still go on playing as if their lives go down with the digits of the scoreboard. She'd been there too, at the team's founding, before any of the generation of miracles had even stepped into a high school, and they had still been five boys screaming desperately at her from a rooftop.

Kuroko calls out for a substitution, pulls Teppei and Hyuuga off the court and replaces them with two second-string players. When they approach the bench, Teppei's leg weakens and he stumbles into Hyuuga, and Riko's world constricts around the three of them—Teppei supported against Hyuuga's chest, Riko's eyes trained on Teppei's knee. Sharper than memory, she is transported to three years ago, the smell of antiseptic and clean sheets, Teppei mouthing, _sorry, sorry,_ Hyuuga snapping, like an echo, "Don't apologize, dumbass."

"Just a little out of breath." Teppei rearranges his body, stacking himself like an ungainly pile of blocks so that he is sitting up straight instead of tripped over in Hyuuga's lap.

"Already? What are they doing to you over there?" Then, following the same instinct as Riko, Hyuuga looks pointedly at Teppei's knee, frowning. "Are you hurting again?"

Teppei waves off his concern, almost swatting Hyuuga in the face with the gesture. "I've been playing in America all this time. It's not that. It's just playing against Kagami again. I'd forgotten what it's like to go all out, and you know he doesn't pull his punches."

"Stupid," Hyuuga grumbles, slapping a water bottle into Teppei's hand. "You need to practice more, you're getting soft."

Since Teppei's return from America, even before the night of the nabe party, they'd been awkward about physical contact. Now, pleasantly exhausted, in the presence of the sport they love too much, they revert back to their high school selves, pressed into each other like pages along the spine of a book as they watch the court in silence. Riko exhales, the memory receding, or at least becoming less pressing. She is back in the present, the tail end of the third quarter of the practice game, no one keeping score, Kagami a one-man team that's winning. Kuroko, who'd taken on half the coaching duties in his last year, spends the rest of the game subbing in players regardless of teams to keep them on their toes, throwing ever-varying triangle defenses and full-court presses against Kagami, who shakes them off like a dog happily thrashing in water. It's unorthodox, but Riko likes the rhythm of it, the stern set of Kuroko's face as he plays up his upperclassman image, bright and strong, as he calls out for the younger players to hustle, make more passes, _let's keep that dribble alive_.

After a while, Hyuuga's voice breaks in. "Was it what you expected?"

"I'm speechless," Teppei tells him, only a little ironically. "I almost can't believe this thing we built together is still here without me. It makes me want to cry."

Hyuuga's draped a towel over his head to wipe the sweat off his forehead. One frayed corner has found its way into his mouth. When he hears Teppei, he spits it out and, face screwed up in a grimace that's the courtside equivalent of a smile, slaps Teppei on the back hard enough for the sound to echo. "Moron, what's there to cry about? Of course the team is still here. What, you think that without you, everything just falls apart?"

"You're always so determined to think the worst of me. That's not what I meant."

Hyuuga growls, neither agreement nor denial. Riko watches as Hyuuga processes his hand still on Teppei's back, flinching before gingerly, purposefully, laying his arm back across Teppei's shoulders, pressing down on Teppei's neck. "Say what you mean, then." A pause, only meaningful to Teppei and Riko. "You're only good at that embarrassing stuff."

"I meant, thank you. I didn't think that I would be the one who couldn't keep my promise. But you did."

"What promise?"

"Back before the match against Touou, when you said I'd be even more happy from now on. I am." Teppei curves his shoulders back, stretching into the physical contact. "Right now I'm happier than I ever thought I could be then. So, thank you. For a lot of things."

Teppei turns to look at Riko, to include her. She smiles automatically, but she is watching Teppei's knee inch and press against Hyuuga's. "Shit," Hyuuga hisses, ducking his head back under the towel, his shoulders shaking as if he were crying. When he throws his head back, though, his mouth is open in a gasp, laughing, and Teppei, after a second, laughs with him.

Riko is well-trained in details, a lifetime of watching Hyuuga and a shorter one watching Teppei, and she doesn't miss the twitch of Teppei's thigh as his knee presses harder, doesn't miss the drop of sweat falling from Hyuuga's jaw to his neck, under the collar of his t-shirt, down to his chest, doesn't miss Teppei watching it too, doesn't miss Hyuuga's arm, easy around Teppei's neck, curving in now, bringing Teppei closer.

Not for the first time, she thinks: the quickest path to Hyuuga's heart has always been to rely on him. Teppei had done that when they started the Seirin basketball team, and it had been the most obvious sign she had missed, that Teppei's knife-sharp appeal was in the way he was always saying, with or without words, _I need you_. He'd been a natural at worming his way into them both. It hadn't been manipulation, or at least not consciously on Teppei's part. But the hypotheticals come quickly and meanly:

If only she had been born a boy too, someone who Teppei could have asked, _play basketball for me_—

If only it was in her nature to build a hole into her life that only Hyuuga could fill—

If only she had an easy weakness, instead of layers upon layers of demands she's made of her own life to justify asking for more from others—

If only she'd been _one of them_—

"Okay, break's over. Substitution!" Hyuuga calls out. Kuroko looks over in surprise, but then, smiling, does a thing with his shoulders that makes him melt into the gym background, suddenly a first-year again in the presence of his captain. Riko shakes her head and spots Kagami, frozen in the middle of considering a three-pointer, grinning at Kuroko from the court, clearly noticing it too. "Furihata, Yagi," Hyuuga barks, "sit your asses down and let the original run-and-gun team show you how it's done!"

He and Teppei rush past, not glancing back at her as they leave the bench. She closes her eyes, scans herself, probing for heartbreak like a strain or muscle knot. Here, in her chest, the overwhelming sense that Teppei is no longer in her reach. Here, in her stomach, the bitter revelation that Hyuuga is no longer waiting for her. And in her right hand, in her left hand, in her legs, in her teeth, in her entire body, that unbearable weight of wanting and being jealous of two people at once, and knowing that she has lost them both, at the same time, to each other.

You can't mourn a thing that never happened or a thing that ended a year ago, quietly and without end-of-life care. So Riko doesn't mourn either. She does agree, a little too quickly, to go to a goukon put on by some girls in her anatomy seminar, which turns out to be her mistake. "Bring that childhood friend of yours, the one that came to the university festival with you," they tell her excitedly. "The one who used to play basketball."

_Hyuuga_, she thinks, her stomach dropping. She hasn't spoken to him in at least a week, and the last time she'd texted him, he'd said, _sorry, I'm at the hospital_, which meant, _I'm with Kiyoshi_.

"He's not the goukon type," she tries. "I've never heard of him going to one."

"Risa's boyfriend says they can't find another guy to even the numbers, and don't tell Yui we told you this, but she's wanted to get his number since November, so _please_, Riko, you _have_ to," one of them says in a desperate, chatty rush, and the problem with having too few girl friends, Riko thinks bitterly, is that you're weak to their slightest confidence.

She calls, compromising between the cowardly side of her that wants to text and the too-proud side of her that wants to see him in person. "You don't have to come," she says after he pauses for too long after her invitation. "I know it's not your thing."

"I'll go," he says, voice tight and unfamiliar over the line.

"What about—"

"I'll go," he says again, before _Teppei_ leaves Riko's mouth.

They're both silent for a long time. Riko runs through various question starters—_are you sure, you don't owe me, I don't want you to, is it to see me_—but everything sounds indecisive or, worse, flirtatious. Chewing on her bottom lip, she counts to three, then five, and settles on, "I'm glad. It's always easier to have someone there you already know."

"Since you're such an expert at this, I'll be counting on you to guide me," Hyuuga jokes, but there's something dry in his tone.

"Don't be an ass," she snaps. "Especially when I'm trying to thank you."

"Yes, yes," he says, laughing. "By the way, which one was Yui?"

"The one who will immediately ask you for your number, probably." And that's natural, she assures herself, that's cheerful and light, the answer of a childhood friend who doesn't complicate anything, not the vindictive one that wants to ask, _wouldn't Teppei see this as cheating_? She hangs up before that one can come out.

On the day of the goukon, Riko's late, and when she arrives, there's only space at the very corner edge of the table next to Risa's boyfriend. It's at the opposite end from Hyuuga, who is talking to a girl Riko doesn't recognize and doesn't notice when Riko sits down. She doesn't know how to make him notice her without drawing attention to it, and tells herself, firmly, that she wouldn't have tried even if she did. She smiles instead at Risa's boyfriend, who jokes that sitting next to a taken guy is reducing her own chances to score a good boyfriend. No, she's good, she assures him, taking a beer and a skewer of chicken thighs from him, not fixating on Hyuuga's sleeves, rolled up to his elbows, exposing the strong tendons of his wrists, so distant from her he might as well be halfway across the world. She turns to the guy next to her, introduces herself, makes a resolution that she won't talk to Hyuuga unless he talks to her first. It's not pettiness, if it's for self-preservation.

By the time she's two beers in, she's angry and a little drunk. Hyuuga is her saint of contradictory emotions. She wills him to come over and is happy that he doesn't, unsure of what she would say or if she wants to talk to him at all. She catches glimpses of his face, him asking someone to pass the chicken meatballs, the sound of him surprised into laughter. One of Risa's friends stage-whispers to her from four seats down, _Hyuuga-kun is cuter than I remember_. She nods, not listening, too busy wondering if she'd been mistaken, how could she not have realized that Hyuuga had become a charming person?

She gets up to go to the bathroom. Hyuuga is sitting on the outside edge of the table, and along the way she passes by his seat, their bodies so close she can almost brush her hand against his shoulder. He half-turns, but only to wave over a waitress, his face turned the wrong way. She feels stuck in some terrible zone of hyperawareness, and, exhausted to the point of tears as she scrubs her hands furiously in the sink, she hears Aomine's voice saying, _imagine a bathtub_, _imagine you are drowning._

When Riko emerges from the bathroom, Yui has moved over to the seat next to Hyuuga. Riko makes herself take only the slightest notice, focused laser-bright on the guy next to her, whose name is Mikoto, or something like that.

"Are you in any clubs?" he asks, handing her another beer.

"Basketball," she says automatically. Then, "I mean, not anymore, just in high school."

"Ah, on the high school team? You must be taller standing up," he jokes.

"Yes," she says, laughing. Did Seirin ever have a girl's basketball team? She can't remember, shakes her head, then nods, admiring this alternate history like a photograph of someone else: her in a jersey, running the length of the court, the ball like a magnet drawn to her hand. A point guard, maybe, just like Teppei.

Mikoto hunches over, moving his shoulder closer to her. "Is that how you know Hyuuga? Someone told me that you two knew each other, and he said he played in high school too."

And that's, well. _Childhood friends_ sounds too obvious and incomplete, but the full account of their relationship would bore even her to tears. She falters as she tries to mirror Mikoto's body language, resting her face on her fist, buying some time. "You said Hyuuga."

He laughs mockingly. "Yeah, the guy you invited that's sitting over there."

His body is blocking her line of sight down the table. She scrambles to remember how other girls act when they flirt. The same as misdirection, she supposes—give them some little true thing to hold onto, then turn the other way. "My first boyfriend was on the basketball team too," she tells him.

He perks up at the change of subject. "Hyuuga?" She shakes her head. "Is that your type? Basketball players?"

When he touches her hand, she flinches, stunned that she's allowed them to get close enough for physical contact. "No, I don't have a type," she says. It's a monstrous lie, one that any ex-Seirin basketball player could dismantle in a few quick anecdotes. There's only one present, though, and he's a table and a world away.

She starts to stand up, her legs unsteady. "I'm going to go," she decides, then realizes belatedly that she's said it out loud. Mikoto looks up at her, surprise smoothing out the mischievous curve of his smile. She thinks, simply, without meanness, _I'm not attracted to him._ It's not his fault, but she can tell with just a quick scan of his body that he's never played a sport, at least not seriously.

"I have to catch the train. It's late and my dad—"

"Riko, _no_," one of the girls next to Mikoto cries.

"Yeah, stay, Riko, you only just got here," Mikoto pleads.

It's flattering, but it'll mean a whole evening of faking the physical language of attraction, or going home later, alone, the same way. This way, she can salvage her dignity, or at least some of her wasted time. She shakes her head fuzzily and says, "I'm sorry. Let's do it again next time, okay?"

"Want someone to come with you?" Risa's boyfriend asks, handing over her coat.

She grins back, slightly manic, sure he'll suggest Mikoto if she gives him the slightest hint of weakness. "No, I'm fine. The station is just around the corner."

"I'll walk you," someone says from across the room.

With too many beers for someone of her weight and drinking experience, Riko processes only a handsome guy with a perfect straight back—the kind of lean, athletic guy Koganei and Izuki could identify instantly as her type, if only he was tall enough.

Then she realizes with a start that she's staring at Hyuuga's chest.

"My dad will kill you if you show up with me smelling like beer," she mutters to him while Risa and her boyfriend titter.

"I'll take that chance," Hyuuga says, both hands on her shoulders, already turning her towards the door. Out of the corner of her eye, Riko can see Mikoto frowning and, this time with meanness, she's pleased.

Hyuuga helps her into her coat, then hands Risa money for both of them to cover the bill while Riko wavers at the door, repeatedly bidding her friends goodbye. He doesn't put his arm around her until they're around the corner from the restaurant and she stumbles, just a little, when navigating a curb. With layers of coats between them, she doesn't feel any warmth, just weight. Something snags at her from the corner of her mind, something about a number and Hyuuga. _His jersey number is 4_, her brain supplies unhelpfully. Eventually a face swims up, breaks the smooth surface of her beer-soaked consciousness, and she tugs at the arm wrapped around her.

"What did Yui say?"

He glances at her, tightens his hold. "Nothing," he says shortly. "I told her I wasn't interested."

"Oh," she says, stupid with surprise.

"Yeah," he huffs, more breath than word, and doesn't say anything else.

He takes her to the station, leads her to the wrong train, and by the time Riko thinks to object, they are sitting side by side traveling the opposite direction from her house. She could—should—ask what they're doing, but instead, as if in geological stop-motion time, she moves her arm, her pinky, then her whole hand closer towards him. When she is mere centimeters away from touching him, he grabs her hand with his colder one and shoves them both unceremoniously into his coat pocket. Hyuuga is turned away from her in the emptying train car, but she can still see a slice of his cheek. As she watches the blush move across Hyuuga's face and then down the long stretch of his neck, she is, for the first time in a long time, completely satisfied.

Hyuuga's tiny apartment, a reward from his parents for testing into a university far above their expectations, is a cramped 1K with a six-tatami room, hardly neat but free for the moment of mold and trash. The main thing Riko notices is that it smells just like him. She's never been here before, and she should ask him what she's doing here. Instead, he deposits her by the low table on the floor, and she texts her mother to tell her father she's staying the night with a girl friend. When Hyuuga comes back, he's carrying two mugs: instant coffee for her, a tea bag and hot water for him. He places them down on the table very carefully, and it takes her longer than usual to connect the dots—Hyuuga's drunk too, and hiding it only barely better than she is.

After the fourth time he picks up his tea and blows across the surface of the water, only to not drink it, Hyuuga narrows his eyes at her and bites out, "You've been avoiding me."

"When? Tonight?"

"In general."

She giggles helplessly, and he glares at her some more. "That's what I was going to say," she tells him and, when he snorts, insists, "No, you haven't said a word to me all night."

"I was," he says with a gesture, almost knocking his mug into his lap, "halfway across the room."

"Well, so was I."

Going whole weeks without seeing or speaking to each other is nothing new for them since starting university. Without basketball or Seirin, they haven't been cut loose, but Riko can add up all the incremental changes that have wedged them apart: separate schools, Hyuuga's new apartment, him on an intramural basketball team and her in a research society that never sets foot on a basketball court. _Even if you hated it, you were always Seirin's mom and dad_, Izuki had told her on the last day of high school. He'd meant, _this will always be our family_, but she hears it now as an accusation: _you're handling this empty-nest phase terribly_.

Which brings them here, the two of them like a reluctant couple waiting for their marriage counselor. Only she knows there's just one person who could play that role, and Teppei is an absence, a phantom limb pushing them into each other, then cleaving them neatly down the middle. She takes a deep breath, spins the handle of her coffee mug, and asks, "How's Teppei?"

Hyuuga does overturn his mug this time, cursing as the hot water sloshes onto his shirt and pants. Panicked, both of them get up, but halfway to the sink, Riko realizes she doesn't know where the towels are and that Hyuuga has disappeared into the bathroom with a crumpled handful of dry clothes. "Fine, I'm fine_,_" he calls from the bathroom, then, "_shit,_" as he stubs his foot on the toilet. "Still fine!"

"I'm sorry, I—"

"Not your fault," he shouts back. Empty-handed, Riko sits back down at the table and waits for Hyuuga, who emerges in sweatpants and a t-shirt she remembers well from high school. He mops up the spilled tea with what looks like a bath towel, then throws the towel haphazardly into the bathroom. "Just a little too much to drink," he mutters, and it's a lie they both don't buy, but Riko can't see the point in arguing.

Without his tea, Hyuuga has no excuse for sitting with her and is reduced to staring intensely down at the surface of the table. Riko bears the silence for three minutes before she breaks again. "If you want to talk, you know, I'm here for you." Hyuuga flinches like she's slapped him in the face, but she plows ahead anyway. "Because I know you don't have many others to talk to, and even if it wasn't him, it isn't exactly a thing you could talk to Izuki about."

His face contorts as he considers his options and, when he comes up cornered with no way out, slackens, making him look bleak. "I don't have anyone, actually. Other than you."

She nods. After a beat, she slides her hand along the right side of the table, bumps into Hyuuga's hand. "I want you to know, I'm your friend. I'll always be your friend." _Yours first_, she thinks as she slots her fingers into his, marveling that it took only that one time on the train for her to catalogue and recall the way he fits against her.

"That's part of the problem with the whole thing, him and me," he says. "Being friends, I mean. I'm not sure we are friends, but even if we were—well, you don't sleep with friends."

"Have you? With him? Since the night of the welcome back party."

Hyuuga takes his glasses off and rubs his face on his sleeve. When he focuses on her again, his expression falls, like he finally realizes she's there and there's nothing he can do about it. Squeezing his eyes shut, he nods. _This is the moment_, Riko tells herself, _pay attention_, _this is what heartbreak feels like._ Their hands are a crooked bridge across the surface of the table, and she lets her fingertips explore the surface of his calloused palm, waiting for her body to seize up like the day of the practice match.

But the moment passes, and her heart is placid, untouched by pain. Instead, uninterested in her attempts at tragic romance, her mind is busy drawing up Teppei and Hyuuga, maybe at this same table, having sex. How, her treacherous imagination is asking, would they touch each other? Despite all her best efforts, they remain in her mind as two shirtless automatons, unconnected and uninterested in each other. Annoyed and almost professionally offended by her failure, she summons up just Teppei, all memorized fact and no conjecture. But she can only remember how it had felt to have to reach for him each time they kissed, the way he'd always hunch over to meet her halfway.

Hyuuga, she knows, wouldn't have the same problem.

The only light on in the apartment is the one above Hyuuga's tiny hallway kitchen. The darkness is a blanket over them, and, feeling safe, hidden from the rest of the world, Seirin and basketball and everyone else they know, she whispers, "What's it like?"

"I hate it." When he doesn't say anything else, she makes a sound—_what else_? His face is twisted with the effort of finding the words, and she thinks, heart thudding, _I did this to him, he's willing to go through this for me_. "It makes me someone I'm not."

"What do you mean?"

"Like my body is all wrong. I can't control it when it's happening. I keep thinking it won't be so—so _much,_ like this time I'd get used to it or—and then it's still—well. You know."

"I don't," she tells him, embarrassed and sensing, somehow, that she owes him this honesty. "I've never, before."

"Good." He squeezes her hand for emphasis. "Don't."

"But eventually you'll get used to it."

"I don't know," he says very seriously. "I think I might die from it before I ever come to like it."

Tired of her outstretched arm, she scoots to the right side of the table, her shoulder banging artlessly into his. She presses her cheek against the table so she can look up into his face. When he squeezes out a smile for her, she lets their knees touch. 

"Maybe if you and I tried it—"

He jerks away. Her body seems to plummet ten floors, and she can almost hear it, their shoulders, their knees, separating from each other with a sickening screech. "What, you think this is the kind of thing I do? Just someone who goes around sleeping with _friends_—"

"No, of course not, I—" The problem, she realizes with a sinking feeling, is that she can feel herself becoming less drunk, a process as muddling as getting drunk. Her head is humming with the movement of her blood, loud enough that she's afraid Hyuuga can hear it too, and she tastes beer and incaution on her tongue. She tightens her grip on his hand, almost pulls at him to keep him from leaping away from the table entirely. "What if I said I wanted to?"

He stares hard at her, his eyes unfocused without his glasses. "Do you want to?"

In the awful silence, she is again in the hospital three years ago, standing outside an open door, trying to pry her way in without being noticed, to be a part of a moment she has not been invited into. Right now, Teppei and Hyuuga are pieces of a broken cup newly joined by gold, a bone fracture not yet set, merely miraculously whole again, and she worries that if she reaches out her hand and touches them, they'll fall into two halves.

But in the dark it is easy, everything is easy. She can face Hyuuga without seeing him, can think of the Teppei of last year without pain. They are two bodies, neither light nor shadow, that she moves closer to. "Yes," she says. Takes a breath, holds on tight, so tight she can feel his pulse through his skin. "Yes, I want to. With you. I want to know. I want _you_ to—"

"I get it, you don't have to keep talking," he blurts out as he tears his hand away, and _oh_, she thinks, stunned and ashamed of his rejection. _This is what you get_, she tells herself, angry to the point of tears, _thinking of yourself so highly, thinking of yourself as a goal_.

But after a moment, he reaches for her face. Trembles when he finally touches her mouth, his palm resting against the curve of her chin. She can hear it in his voice, a neediness as clean and obvious as the immaculate arc of a perfect jump shot, as he says, "if you want it, if you really want me to," and she thinks stupidly, _every shot you don't take is a shot you miss_. Thinks, _maybe this one, maybe now_, _it'll be okay_.

What she'll remember later: Hyuuga's body luminous in the dark, white against the pitch-black of his hair, which she touches, flattening and pulling in fits. "Let me turn on the light, I can't see," he keeps saying, but she tells him no, grabbing his hands back but too embarrassed to put them anywhere on her body, compromising by placing them gently on the futon next to her hips. Holding her breath, waiting for him to creep closer, the farthest thing in the world from her, and then the closest, closer than anyone has ever been to her. The first touch of his fingers, hesitant, reverent as he rests them between her thighs, and she wants to ask if this is his first time with someone other than Teppei, but she doesn't, can't bear to hear the answer either way. His face without glasses, more naked than his body, as he leans in to kiss her on the forehead. The brush of his lips against her cheek, her nose, then her mouth, as he eases one finger in. The mechanics of it are obvious to her, her body knows what it is doing as he presses in, but when she tightens around his fingers, he breathes too quickly and too often, hyperventilating, and she has to tell him, "I'm fine, don't stop." They're both too nervous to find a rhythm that works for her, and the feeling crests, stalls, creeps away too many times to break. Eventually his hand stops, and she holds him by the waist, expectant, but he has to tell her that he doesn't keep any condoms here, they're with—_they're with_—

He's unable to say the name out loud. She grits her teeth, puts her hand on his neck, calculating the risks quickly in her head, but before she gets anywhere, he shifts, trapping her at the wrong angle for them to get any further. When she protests, he presses her harder against the futon and asks, "What if I—on you—"

"Is that enough for you?" she asks, and winces, thankful that in the dark and without his glasses, he can't possibly see how sincerely she means the question. Thankful that he's clumsy with eagerness when he takes himself in hand, tongue tripping over the words as he says, "Anything at all, it's good, please—"

What she'll remember forever: his heavy weight as he rests on top of her after coming on her stomach. His voice breaking with relief as he whispers nonsensically, "Thank god, it's you." The feel of his arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders, his body shuddering for minutes afterwards, like he can't get himself back under control, the hard pressure of his teeth behind his lips as he turns his face into her neck. She wants to watch him as he falls asleep, to memorize this moment so that it will always come back to her in startling, perfect clarity.

Instead, with Hyuuga curled around her, she is lulled into sleeping soundly through the night.

Despite her inexperience, Riko is not stupid. She knows that sex solves nothing. It's not like sleeping with Hyuuga gives her claim over him or that Hyuuga's choice to keep sleeping with Teppei is an answer. In place of any solutions, new and interesting complications arise, and she doesn't know how to assign them the proper weight: whether Hyuuga sounds the same when he is with Teppei, if he would smell like Teppei afterwards, if the condoms he presents her a week after the goukon, when she skips her afternoon classes to meet him at his apartment, is the brand Teppei uses, and if it matters. When they try them out, she bleeds just a little and, anxious, he doesn't manage to come properly inside her. Afterwards they lie next to each other, not touching and surprisingly content, taken aback by all the ways their bodies fit together and all the ways they don't.

"My tongue feels thick in my mouth," he pants, squinting at the ceiling as if it could give him answers. "I feel like I'm too aware of my own skin."

"Too much sex," she jokes, but runs a practiced gaze over his body. More than before, she sees him perfectly, can form his shape with her two hands, eyes closed—the muscles of his legs, his face up close when exerting, the slightly sweet taste of his sweat, how much weight his knees can take, the grip of his toes against an unresisting surface like bedsheets. She should sleep with all the players, she thinks stupidly. If she did, their bodies could never lie to her again.

"Is it—what does it feel like? When we, you know?" he asks, passing her a hand towel to wipe up.

"Like a bruise you keep pressing, because it feels good," she says, and laughs at his shocked expression.

"Sorry, I didn't—"

"It's fine," she says, cutting him off. "I'm sure it gets better. Anyway, I don't dislike it."

Her experience with sex is rudimentary, but the physics of it, even between two men, are not difficult to grasp. Was Hyuuga asking because he wanted a comparison, or because he didn't know what it would feel like to be in her position? And how could he trust her to give him a reply, when her experience, too, was so limited? She should be more passionate, she thinks despairingly, but instead her worries are rigorous and scientific, concerned about method, cause and effect, the repeatability of their disparate experiences. If she could only _see_ the two of them with her own eyes, or somehow put herself in their bodies, be there, feel it with them. She imagines herself in Hyuuga's apartment, an uninvited voyeur: they would come in, maybe drunk, overenthusiastic, and start without noticing her there, those unlikely dramatic situations she reads about in novels or sees in the movies—but then she remembers that, without a key to Hyuuga's apartment, she has no way of being here without him.

The humane thing to do would be to make Hyuuga choose between them. He was always best when forced into a tight corner, the clutch player who only showed up when there were no other options, _because_ there were no other options. He'd never be the kind to dwell on hypotheticals, or be particularly good at dating two people at once, even with two willing participants. Riko has no illusions about Hyuuga; this inability to deal in half-measures isn't necessarily an attractive quality in a person. But she's been in this situation before, last January, waiting for Teppei to say something about the future. And now here she is again, only this time, like musical chairs, she finds Hyuuga in Teppei's spot and Teppei waiting patiently beside her. They'd spent the last week doing a complicated dance, never all three in the room together, except for a few minutes at the hospital, she and Hyuuga making minimal conversation as they pass each other by like strangers, shoulders stiff. And from his seat by the window, where he inevitably sits peeling apples or steeping tea for his grandmother, Teppei smiles benevolently, watching them trade places, as if he were the one sleeping with them both.

Riko has never liked feeling greedy, and that's what Hyuuga makes her feel: like she has gotten everything she could ever ask for, but still wants more. But she's learned from basketball that there are things more than desire, things you can demand separately from a body during sex or a heart during love, and these, too, she wants from Hyuuga. _Do you like Teppei more_, she finds herself thinking as she scrutinizes Hyuuga's naked back. _If it was a matter of the rest of your life—if the world was going to end and you had only one night—if we were both dangling off a cliff—if he were a girl—if you could only donate one of your kidneys_—

"It'll only be for a few more weeks," Hyuuga says from across the room, startling her. "Because, you know, America. He'll be going back soon." He watches her earnestly and when she only stares back at him, blank, he fumbles for his pants, face red.

_It's easy to be your first choice if I'm the only choice._ She bites her lip hard so she doesn't say it out loud. Instead, she nods and lets him hold her hand all the way to the convenience store, where she buys a toothbrush so she can stay the night.

But because Teppei, too, she had loved with an exhausting kind of devotion, she wonders what would be left for him if Hyuuga _did_ choose her. And because Teppei, too, was a friend first before she dated him, she feels that sadness in her like an exit wound, the knowledge that in this world, there can only be one Hyuuga Junpei, and a person cannot be split in half and still be whole.

And because Hyuuga was her friend before he loved her, if he has ever loved her at all, she ponders as they lie side by side in the dark if there is a way for her to leave them without breaking his heart. When none come to her, she reaches into the air in front of her, groping for the shape of something she can barely see and may not even exist. "Hyuuga-kun," she says, and he turns over so he can tuck his nose against her shoulder as he makes a blurry noise of acknowledgment. "What is it like for you?" she asks. "When you do it with me."

For a long time, he says nothing. She is worried that he has fallen asleep, and she drops her hand to her chest, empty. But finally, he burrows deeper into her neck and wraps an arm around her waist. His words come to her as if from a great distance, fragile and half-asleep and all the more honest for it. "Completeness," he murmurs. "Don't you feel it? A chance to finally get everything right."

Surely, she frets, listening to his breath even out and slow down, she can be happy with that.

In February, Aida Kagetora finally convinces one of his other former teammates to apply for a teaching position at Seirin and also to coach the Seirin basketball team. Kuroko pens Riko a painstakingly polite text to get her to attend a planning meeting at Seirin with the new coach. "It wouldn't be right," he reassures her, helping her out of her coat when she arrives, "having just a team member like me hand off the team in your place."

"It's not my team anymore," she says, embarrassed. "I'm an alum. It's mostly your team now."

Kuroko smiles blandly at her, and it isn't until he's done hanging up her coat and offering her a chair that she realizes he got her exactly where he wanted: here, with her notebooks in one hand and a list of questions about their plans for next year in the other.

Itou, the new coach, introduces himself as someone who "only played second-string for the national team, I'm afraid," and refers to her father as "Aida-senpai," which unnerves Riko. She's seen him once or twice as her dad's drinking buddy, but in front of them, at least, Itou has none of her dad's quirks, and is instead efficient and serious in a way Kagetora has only ever been in front of paying customers. Riko does have a brief back-and-forth with him about speed training, and he tells her that she's Kagetora's daughter after all, in a tone that's both amused and admiring, which makes her blush.

But in the end, as Riko predicted, most of the afternoon is spent peppering Kuroko with questions about the players and succession plans for the captaincy next year, with the second-year manager occasionally chiming in. Kuroko is unusually tense during the whole thing, and it's not until the meeting is over and he and Riko are the only ones left slowly sipping the remains of their tea that it occurs to her that the last time Kuroko worked with an adult coach, his psychotic teammate developed a split personality and all of his friends left him.

"Hey," she says, touching his shoulder. When he looks up at her, she finds herself tallying up all the ways he's changed since she first laid eyes on him: the few centimeters of height he's managed to claw up, the way he's grown into his face, his well-defined but slender arms and legs, which they both know will never be truly muscular. They've spent three years working on his body, and by now she knows its quirks almost as well as he does. Kuroko will never be a disappointment to her, but she's learned that, despite outward pessimism, he's an idealist at heart. Even now, he hasn't made peace with some of his more unrealistic expectations.

She tries to smile at him reassuringly. It doesn't work. "If you ever need anything," she starts. The end of the sentence is more difficult. It's the second time in less than a month she's offered this kind of help to someone, and it hasn't gotten any easier. She bites the inside of her mouth, wishing suddenly that Teppei were here to find the right words. He had been good for that, back when they were both on the basketball team, and this was at least tangentially still basketball-related. "If anything happens, with the team or with you in the future, if you want to talk to someone about it and there's no one else—"

"Coach is very kind," Kuroko cuts in, much to Riko's relief. "Thank you."

"You can stop calling me that, you know. I'm not your coach anymore."

Kuroko grins, picking up her teacup. "Aren't you still coaching me right now?" he asks, and jumps away from her with a laugh when she pretends to jab him in the stomach.

After they put away the tea leaves and cups in the teacher's office, they find themselves automatically heading towards the gym, a well-worn groove that Riko doesn't bother trying to resist. At this time of the year, there's no weekend practice, mandatory or voluntary, and the cavernous space is uncharacteristically silent. Riko has rarely ever been in the gym when there isn't any basketball being played. The emptiness makes her feel like an intruder, the ghost of Seirin basketball past. It magnifies even Kuroko's voice as he asks her about college and how her dad is doing, for once making him the largest, most obvious thing on the court.

As if summoned by her earlier thoughts, Teppei shows up just as they're about to lock up. He has a coat pocket full of old-fashioned hard candy and a small plastic bag of oranges slung around one arm. "Just got back from the hospital," he tells them as he tries to pawn some of the candy off on Kuroko, who politely refuses and slips away before either of them notice. "The school was on the way home, and someone told me you'd be here."

_And you came to the gym to find us, of course_. Riko smiles to herself; if nothing else, they would always have this in common. She makes her way over to the raised stage behind one of the hoops, hoists herself up so she's sitting with her legs dangling, and eyes him. He doesn't look devious, but that had never been one of Teppei's tells. "Did Hyuuga-kun send you?"

"No, though he was the one who told me I could find you here with Kuroko." He lifts himself onto the stage too, sitting a comfortable distance away, the plastic bag of oranges between them. He fishes one out to offer her, and when she shakes her head, starts to peel it on his own. "How is he, by the way?"

She considers being sarcastic—_who, Kuroko? _Her better, and meaner, nature wins out. "Aren't you the one I should be asking?"

"Why? It's not like he talks to me."

The urge to pick up all of Teppei's oranges and throw them at his head passes with some difficulty. She fidgets instead with the old notebooks she had brought, curling the paper edges the way she used to when she was still a student and brainstorming training routines for the two of them. Maybe Hyuuga will always be a dead end between them, the only thing that had ever put them at cross-purposes with each other. Still, there are other open questions she hasn't settled when it came to Teppei. It's easy for Teppei to be honest with her, because even years later she can read lies on him like hairline fractures or twisted ankles. But despite all that, she always pictures him first as something twisted in itself, opaque and subject only to his own whims and reasons. It is always up to her to force him open. 

"Teppei," she ventures, "why did we break up?"

His hand stills. When he looks over at her, his face is so placid it feels like a mirror, like maybe if she looked hard enough she would see her own reflection in it. "Which time?"

In high school, she might have hit him in response. But she's matured, or at least she's moved past petty violence. It had never worked on him anyway. He had a body and a temperament that flourished under physical pain, which was part of what made him attractive and also frustrating. "Either time," she says. "Or, well, the second time. And don't say it's because you were headed to America." _You went to America to get away from me,_ she thinks, but keeps to herself. Even true, it's an unfair accusation. 

"I liked you," he says simply. There is a long pause, and right before Riko cuts in to tell him, _that's not an answer_, he continues, "And I thought you liked me too. But in the end, I was wrong. I think you were just using me as a way to sort out whether or not you liked Hyuuga." 

Stunned, she makes a noise of protest, half swallowed words and half a kiai, her body rushing ahead of her, ready to fight. But he puts up a hand between them, palm incongruously up, as if presenting her to herself, or offering something to her she can't see. "It's okay," he reassures her. "I don't blame you now."

Riko lets out a breath between her teeth. "You're unbelievable, you know that?" She looks up at the ceiling, her eyes suddenly hot. "I would never hurt either of you."

"I wasn't hurt by it."

It's a lie of unbelievable magnitude, but when she shoots him an angry look, she can tell he isn't trying to pass it off as truth, just a stop-gap to give them both face, so she lets it slide. "I wouldn't do that to _him_, then," she counters.

"I'm not saying you meant to," he says, voice perfectly controlled even as she stares him down. "Just that we all do funny things sometimes, when we're not sure where we stand."

Riko first realized she could read a human body around the last year of junior high, right before high school. Suddenly, the human body was laid out before her like a multiplication table, and she could scan it for answers. The awakening was like how teachers haltingly talked about puberty, a sudden realization of where all your parts were supposed to go, what could stretch and what could grow and what was, for the time being, just a fog of hormones. She thought of it like fortune-telling, a scatter of human bones, an oracle of muscle training. All she was lacking was interpretation. Her dad laughed at her when she told him that, but didn't say she was wrong. 

Since then, she's learned the limitations of that ability. The body has its own logic and can be reduced easily to muscles and ligatures, but that was all. She knows, better than anybody, the things the body cannot tell you. Her ability gives her no more insight than taking someone's temperature can tell you what their voice sounds like, or what their parents do for a living. Given a million chances, she would still have never been able to read what made Kuroko special when he first landed in her lap. And with Teppei, at the time, she had only been able to tell that there was a weakness in his knee, a subtle flaw that he had split open with his own devotion until it was a chasm, but how to heal it, and the fact that it would eventually make him flee from her—those things had been, and still are, beyond her ability.

Still, as she watches Teppei pick pith away from an orange, nervously waiting for a response, she's reminded that understanding comes to her best when the physical body is in front of her. She needs the structure of the human frame before she can locate the heart. The problem with the last few weeks was that she'd let Teppei stay obscured, in hospital rooms or behind Hyuuga's scowl as he read a text message. There is a wrenching realization as she looks at him now, like a balloon popping or a bird being shot out of the sky: she had been wrong about how much he knew. All her earlier thinking about Teppei, the idea of subterfuge, of him arranging them around him like backup dancers in a ballet under his watchful gaze, was ludicrous. He didn't know: not Hyuuga's feelings, not her own, maybe not even that they were sleeping together. 

Riko puts the notebooks on her lap to one side, giving herself an excuse to scoot a little closer to Teppei, as if bridging the physical distance would help him understand where she's coming from. It takes everything in her not to reach out to touch him when she tells him, "It's not fair to treat Hyuuga-kun like a relay race. You can't just tag me in because you don't want to deal with his feelings anymore, and then tag me out when you're ready."

"Is that what it looks like I'm doing?"

"Yes," she says, blunt. 

He bares his teeth at her, not quite a grin. "I don't want to tag you out."

"Okay," she says slowly, not quite sure where this is going.

"Does he like you?"

"Does he like _you_?"

"No," Teppei says simply. "I don't think he ever will, really. I don't think either of us are very good at 'like' when it comes to each other. But that's not the point." He splits his peeled orange in half and passes one half of it to her. When she accepts it without thinking, he passes her the other half too, and picks up a new one, scoring it gently with his blunt nails as he turns it over and over again. "That time in the restaurant, at the very beginning, when you said you were just Hyuuga's friend, were you lying? Because if you did that for me—"

"No, it's just—I was telling the truth, at that time. We've never—we've always missed the opportunity—"

"Because I've always thought you two would be good together. You always were, even before. I'd get jealous, watching the two of you, how well you knew him. He liked you a lot, more than he'll ever like me." He tilts his head, coy and cat-like as he narrows his eyes. "Only we never knew whether you liked him too."

"I do," she snaps. "I've liked him a long time. Maybe always, without knowing about it. But what does that matter now?"

For such a heavy confession, one she hasn't even given to Hyuuga, the words are as light as air when they leave her. She can't swallow them back in, and she refuses to regret them, so instead she falls silent. Teppei smiles, his profile bright and soft in the winter afternoon sunlight. They sit there for a long time, neither of them saying anything else. _I liked you too_, she doesn't say. She loves him, still, a deeper love than what she feels for Hyuuga, but not deeper in intensity, just in instinct, a muscle ache her body has learned many times, her heart reshaped to fit his mold each time.

Now, sitting there, her hands cupped around the segments of an orange, she is demolished by how much she still loves him. It bubbles up in her like laughter after a good cry. Her thoughts peel off, one after another, euphoric and nonsensical, with a logic only she understands: _I like you, I'm happy, I like you both_. She wants to hold them both, press them into each so they are two halves of a cup made whole in her hands, her love for Teppei moving through her, Teppei's gentleness moving through Hyuuga, _completeness_—

Teppei takes a deep breath. "It matters, you know," he tells her. "A great deal actually. I want you to be happy. You owe it to yourself, to take what makes you happy." He means it so earnestly it hurts her, the way he can make her feel so strongly that she is good and limitless and worth everything in the world. She's always loved that too, Hyuuga who was at his best when someone believed in him, and Teppei who was his best when he believed in someone else.

And she, who was at her best when she could believe in herself.

She brings a piece of orange to her mouth and bites down. Tasting sweetness, the rough pith, the bright sweet-sour of it. Oranges and the smell of a basketball court with no one in it, the smell of Teppei in a wool sweater in winter. Despite what she says, she too visualizes her feelings for Hyuuga like a heavy weight she has carried and will now pass on. This is it, the last few seconds of a game, and she holds those feelings like a burning shape in her hands as she moves down the court. There under the basket, crouched and ready, stands Teppei: knees bent, arms spread, iron heart, iron hands, iron will. _This is my man_, she thinks. _He has learned my tricks, he has guarded me all this time, he knows how I will move. Where I will go. Who I will pass this love onto_.

She has never been a basketball player, has never been a man on the court, only the coach watching over them both, and so she knows this shot of hers will fail. Still, it is okay. Here, she can finally make peace with being in second place. Like a prayer, she lets the ball fly from her hands, into his.

"I don't need to take Hyuuga from you to be happy," she tells him. It's not even a lie when it leaves her lips, and she's glad for that. "I'm happy now, without him. Just as long as both of you are happy."

_Here,_ she thinks, _I entrust him to you._

Three hours later, Hyuuga shows up at her house with a bruise blooming on his cheek.

"Before you ask," he says, wincing as she pokes at it in disbelief, "it wasn't my fault."

"Who did this to you?"

"Who else?" He gives her a look that would be withering if his glasses weren't slightly askew on his forehead. She jabs his cheek a little harder in retribution, and he jerks away, hissing.

"No broken skin," she pronounces when she comes back upstairs with an ice pack and two cups of coffee. "No broken bones either. The pain at least will go away in a day or two. Now, what in the world _happened_?"

"Like I know," he bites out, taking the ice pack she hands him and sitting down heavily on her bed. She can hear the faint sounds of her dad downstairs still complaining to her mom about young men coming into good girls' houses this late at night, and takes the initiative to lock the door, in case he gets it into his head to barge in on them. "That's a question for him," Hyuuga continues, eyes tracking her as she settles into her desk chair, "because I have no idea. One moment he had the gall to ask if I liked you, and I said yes, of course I did, if it weren't for this—this _thing_ with him I'd still be trying to date you, and what business of it was his, really, since he dumped you to go to America—"

"He didn't dump me," she hisses, offended. "We just stopped seeing each other, because he _went to America—_"

"He _dumped you,_" he hisses back at her. "So where does he get off, anyway, telling me when I should tell you that I like you? I should have punched _him _in the face. Yeah, I like you. I'm just working up the courage to ask you to marry me and risk your dad killing me, okay? I'd rather wait until I'm 25 to die, thanks."

She gapes at him, speechless. As if only just realizing what he'd admitted, Hyuuga suddenly shuts up, turning bright red. With one hand holding the ice pack to his cheek, he can't cross his arms like he wants to, and instead compulsively grabs handfuls of her comforter as if to prevent himself from leaving through the window out of shame. 

She reaches for one of the cups of coffee on her desk and drinks too quickly, burning her mouth. When she coughs, Hyuuga makes an abrupt jerking motion like he wants to come to her aid, but, tethered to her bed, he just stares at her coffee resentfully. _That's sweet_, a part of her brain registers nonsensically.

"Did you punch him back?" she asks, feigning nonchalance as she blows at the coffee.

He grimaces for a long time. Finally, he admits, "No. At first I was just too shocked. But then when he said I was taking advantage of you—" Hyuuga screws up his face, ashamed. "Maybe he was right. So I stormed off."

"And you want to marry me, huh."

He sighs, resigned, and turns his head to look out the window. When she follows his gaze, she can only see the streetlight outside, casting a cold light on someone bundled up in a black coat passing by, nothing interesting. They've been here before, she thinks, having a difficult conversation about her past and Teppei while trying not to let her father know what they were up to. At least this time they are inside.

"Didn't you know? Everyone else does. They've known for ages. Izuki's texted me 'when should I expect Riko to be expecting?' every new year's since I met you." He finally lets go of Riko's sheets to scrub at his face. "Fuck," he says with feeling. "I'm doing this all wrong. I'm not blaming you for not knowing. It's my fault. I should have said—well, not that, but something."

When he looks up at her, his eyes are red. His body is hunched in, like he's gone ten rounds with himself, or like the way he used to look sometimes out on the court, nursing a ball with no obvious path forward, knowing it is up to him to make the shot or they will lose. She had loved him best in those moments, right before he let go of the ball, one man fighting against the probability of defeat and somehow, each time, succeeding. 

"You know I'd choose you first," he says, desperately. "You know we both would."

Riko exhales and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, trying not to cry. More than anything, she realizes with a start, she is relieved. In her imagination, Hyuuga's confession has always fallen on her like an anvil cut loose, or a strike of lightning eviscerating them both. Instead, it lands softly, a piece clicking into place, a gear shifting just enough so that the grating screech of the last few weeks suddenly subsides, leaving her mind clear for the first time in a while. 

In the end, she thinks, the one mistake she'd made was critical, but understandable: she'd let Teppei set the pace. He'd been the one that misled them into believing sex was the problem and the solution both. After all, it'd been the first question he'd posed to Hyuuga, and Riko had fallen into that rabbit hole with them, stupidly evaluating their three-sided relationship through that paradigm and finding herself lacking. But it's been three years, and she more than anyone should have remembered that they haven't changed. Hadn't she always been the coach for a reason? They were arms and legs, and she the heart in the middle that bent them to her will. Without her, they might still move, but only ever blindly, in the wrong direction. 

"I knew," she whispers, her voice breaking. She swallows and, louder this time, says, "I've always known."

Like a wire snapping, all tension released, Hyuuga slumps backwards, letting his back hit the wall. "Okay," he breathes. "This isn't exactly how I meant for this to go," he says, "but okay."

She smiles shakily at him. She wants nothing more than to go over and sit on the bed with him, maybe hold his hand, but now that he's properly confessed, she's shy all of a sudden, reverting to a prior point in their relationship before they ever slept together. Her body and heart, on different timelines. "We did this all wrong," she muses out loud. "Out of order, I mean. Don't people usually confess first?"

Hyuuga smiles back, wry. "Be lenient, coach. It's my first time." He hesitates. "If you don't count, you know, him."

"Mine too," she reminds him. "If you don't count him."

He rubs his face with one hand, then winces, clearly having forgotten his bruised cheek. "In that case, I guess mistakes are inevitable."

"Funny," she says, uncrossing her legs. "I was just thinking the same thing."

She means to go over to him, but as she gets up, something snags in her memory, and she strides over to the window, where she can now clearly see that the figure in black she'd seen passing by earlier was Teppei, and that he is still there, nursing a can of coffee in his ungloved hands. Her hand knocks against the glass before she registers what she's doing, and with a jerk he looks up, scanning the front of the house blindly before spotting her and waving. 

She turns to Hyuuga. "Did you know Teppei was outside?" When he shakes his head, she hums to herself, considering. "Probably making sure my dad hasn't killed you yet."

The expression on Hyuuga's face, despite the ice slapped against his cheek, seems to say,_ oh, come on, _smug and self-deprecating at the same time. "Are you kidding? He's definitely here to make sure I've apologized like a good little boy."

"Have you?" she jokes.

"That's for you to say, isn't it?"

She turns to the window, flattered and trying to hide it from Hyuuga. Teppei stares up at her through the glass with a nervous smile. _What an idiot_, she thinks, a little angrily. It's Teppei who, in the end, needs lessons in selfishness. She, who had watched him play, should have known better than to trust the shadow he cast on the court, the way he seemed all-knowing and insurmountable when faced head-on. How could she have ever thought that he was lording over them, parceling out emotions and arranging them in the formation he wanted? It had been something much stupider than that, a remnant of his bad habits from middle school—he'd simply given up on being anyone's number one.

She sees it now, him leaving after his grandmother gets better. He'd go back to the United States, leave them with the ambiguous directive to take care of each other, as if their happiness could be contained by only the two of them, instead of orbiting around him as well. He'd go through the rest of his life believing that self-sacrifice is the only way to show affection. They'd see each other, maybe at her wedding. Her dad would walk her down the aisle, of course, but Teppei would be the one giving her away, even though he'd long given up the right to have her at all.

But she's dealt with worse bad habits before, has trained out loose wrists, telegraphed passes, badly placed thumbs, sloppy defenses. It is okay to want the best from the people you love, to make them better for you. Self-sacrifice and denial are how Teppei and Hyuuga deal with things, but she doesn't have to follow them into that abyss just because she loves them. She's under no obligation to see love as they do, a series of gestures giving yourself or the things you love away. She'd rather do it her way.

The completeness Hyuuga was searching for could never be accomplished by just any two of them, could never be achieved by cutting away, only by bringing more in. 

"Hey, Hyuuga-kun," she muses, "if Teppei and I were both dangling off a cliff's edge and you could only rescue one—"

"Don't be stupid," Hyuuga snorts. "A cliff? Stop Iron Heart Kiyoshi? He'd probably vault over the edge and rescue you himself. Meanwhile I'd trip on a rock running to your rescue and then I'd be the one falling off, and you'd both have to rescue me."

Riko, laughing, goes to her closet and starts to pull a coat on. In her head, like always, she draws up a plan. Have her mother deal with her dad. Go downstairs, let Teppei in, and brew him a cup of tea. Bring him upstairs, sit him down on the floor. Make sure that Hyuuga knows he's forbidden from leaving, no matter how awkward it gets. Hold out both her hands, one for each of them.

And then, maybe, they can all start holding onto each other.

**Author's Note:**

> me: haha what if i write about the seirin second years  
me:  
me: [five years later]
> 
> \- title from Kings of Convenience's "[24-25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yanODtMA7Vg)": what we built is bigger than the sum of two / but somewhere i lost count of my own / and somehow i must find it alone. Highly recommend that linked performance if you are hearing it for the first time, because the way erlend oye delivers his lines is perfection. 
> 
> \- this fic has been almost four years in the making. i abandoned it at 12k and by the time i came back to it, fujimaki jossed me with extra game, knb fandom officially died, and i had completely lost the writing voice i had adopted. but i sure as hell wasn't going to waste 12k of fic, good or bad, so here you are and here i am and we will both have to accept the consequences. 
> 
> \- thank you to my first, last, best, and only editor, who egged me on and never let me forget that i owed her this fic from the moment i stepped into writing for knb, didn't comment on the fact that i let it hibernate for years, and then smoothed over all the rough edges when i finally picked it up again. i would be a series of misplaced commas, scenes referring to conversations that never happened, and dialogue that doesn't land, if i didn't have you.
> 
> \- come talk to me at mudasquared @ twitter! i promise i only bite a little.


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